Unfortunately, the removal of such a principal from this school less than a month before it opens is not sufficient. Serious questions about her handiwork - her choices with respect to KGIA’s curriculum, its textbooks, its teachers, the “retired Arabic-speaking community members” the Post reported that she wanted to bring in to “converse with the students during lunch periods,” etc. - remain to be satisfactorily addressed.

As Pam Hall, a spokeswoman for the Stop the Madrassa Community Coalition, said upon learning of the Almontaser resignation:

“Dhabah Almontaser’s resignation is an implicit admission of what we at the Coalition have maintained all along: Her ideological agenda of using taxpayer-financing to promote Islamism disqualified her from having anything to do with a public school. Under present circumstances, however, the only way the so-called Khalil Gibran International Academy could open this September would be to rely upon Ms. Almontaser’s appalling and reprehensible decisions, her judgments and, yes, her political agenda. So this school must not open.”

Examples of that agenda are contained in the “Executive Summary” Ms. Almontaser produced to describe her program for KGIA, which was made public in response to a Freedom of Information Law request filed by the Coalition member John Matthies of the Middle East Forum’s Islamist Watch. As two members of the Coalition, William Mayer and Beila Rabinowitz, note in a critical analysis of the Summary posted on their blog, PipeLineNews.com http://www.pipelinenews.org/index.cfm?page=kgiaexec8607%2Ehtm):

“Charges leveled against KGIA by these writers - that it will in essence function as a madrassa, a center for indoctrination not education - are proven by the school’s own executive summary, a document recently released under threat of a lawsuit by the Stop The Madrassa Coalition. The summary is actually a manual for creating an Islamist vocational school, one in which every activity is planned around creating social activists with an Arab supremacist mindset, in the mold of KGIA’s activist/principal Dhabah Almontaser.”